


Siempre Vencedor y Jamás Vencido

by toastpiercer



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Gen, Gustavo Fring is Disney Villain Camp, M/M, Millionaires Crying Alone with Meth Labs, No Plot/Plotless, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-10-07
Packaged: 2018-02-19 09:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2383640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toastpiercer/pseuds/toastpiercer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You are large, you contain multitudes-- you have your dwelling in the tombs, and there no living man can bind you. The howling emptiness behind your false eyes is as vast and void as the space between the stars.</i>
</p><p>Gus Fring thinks about how sad, evil, and gay he is. Nothing happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sometimes you drive out to UNM just to stand in the lobby of the new science center.

Your first thought had been to get him the whole building, to erect a multi-million dollar sarcophagus in the desert to the scale and scope of your grief. But your second thought was that that would have been too conspicuous, an unsubtle display of wealth to the DEA, and more dangerously, a betrayal of the true depths of your feelings to Don Eladio's cartel. You are a cautious man. So it is not the Maximino Arciniega Science Building to which you make your irregular pilgrimages, but in the middle of a curved wall on the left, his name is carved along with those of the other minor donors. "In memory of."

Twelve hundred dollars for you to come and study the pale, polished veins in a rock, without so much as an epithet to stand as a testament to twenty-seven short years of precious life, to unknowable decades of stolen time.

The stone is light; you cast no reflection, and you find this is necessary for you, as you do not want to know what sort of changeling it is that now wears your human skin. It was a man that entered Don Eladio's hacienda that day, but the thing born there was something else entirely, a monster almost elegant in the craven simplicity of its desires, a wendigo ravenous for flesh, for blood-- a creature that will choke itself gorging on the suffering of others and still never ever be satisfied. You are large, you contain multitudes-- you have your dwelling in the tombs, and there no living man can bind you. The howling emptiness behind your false eyes is as vast and void as the space between the stars. 

For years now, there has not been any question of _rest_ , there has not been any question of _end_ You have known for a long time that you will deal as much death as you can, and that you then will stop when your body finally breaks down. You are dead, you are dead, you are dead already, you have been dead for twenty years, but the white hairs at the top of your head begin to concern you. In these latter days, you can begin to feel the rage you have nurtured like a fungus in your chest seeping through your skin, the corrosion spreading like acid from the outside of your body. There is so much more justice and horror and death still to be dealt, sangre por sangre, and you need more time. 

You believe only in things that can be seen and touched and felt in this world-- money, power, vengeance-- and you never nurtured the cloying religious sentiment of your mother or entertained your father's hollow, hypocritical moralizing, but the sheer volume and horrific ferocity of your sins have lead you assume that there will be no rest for you, not even in death. When you die, you envision not the black oblivion of dreamless sleep, nor even the seventh circle, reserved for those whose sin was violence, but for the creature inside of you to rear its head at last, free from the confines of your mortal shell, triumphant in its true form: a formless, unrelenting hatred to spread out across the sands like ink spilled over on white paper. 

Max's bones are lost somewhere in that endless desert, Max's earnest eyes and gentle hands and love for you are lost somewhere in the endless past; you will never recover any of them. If you hadn't known him to be so generously kind and forgiving in life, you almost imagine the two of you might have mingled essences in death and whorled together in those boundless sands, united again at last, a vengeful miasma to cast a shadow over the landscape for the eternity to come. 

But he was always your other half, and all the best parts of you were in him. He had loved you so much once, he had used his final breaths begging for your life.

You do not think that he would love you now. There is nothing in you left to be loved.

The flecks of gold in the stone glitter most brightly in the darker crevices where the letters are engraved. You study the way the light changes them in the sunset, and you do not weep.


	2. epilogue

You die at last, in fire and fury, just as you have lived.

There is not much of a service. There is no one left to mourn you, not even for show, not now that the whole world knows your true face. But the law honors the last wishes of even the bloodiest butcher, and whatever you were, something must be done with the remains.

You constructed your final plans as meticulously as any others. In the late afternoon, when shadows stain the desert wine-dark, a chaplain from the nearest penitentiary mumbles an impersonal, secular prayer. The mourners present, a receptionist for the funeral home and one of the technicians at the crematorium, who had decided together to attend out of pity, chime back an uneasy amen.

Your ashes rise from the urn and hang in place for a moment, like a cloud. Then the wind scatters them far and away across that rust-red emptiness and into the boundless, distant blue. 

It had still been your hope that, spread so thin, some part of you might find its way back home. That some of your dust might yet find its way to his dust.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is the motto of the Chilean army, and translates to "Always Victorious and Undefeated" in English.


End file.
